Our crew unveils the new, user friendly Fairewinds' Timeline Maker for tracking problems at individual nuclear plants around the world. Listen as Nat, Lucas and Arnie explain how simple it was to use the Fairewinds' Timeline Maker to illustrate the technical issues and flawed corporate decision-making that ultimately forced the shutdown of San Onofre. The Timeline Maker can be used at any nuclear plant throughout the nation, and can be customized by individuals and groups to prevent Forty Good Years from becoming One Bad Day. As Lucas explains, by using the Fairewinds Timeline Maker "I have yet to find a nuclear power plant where I have not been surprised, if not mildly alarmed, at the track record that they show over time when you legitimately collect the data and analyze it on one plate instead of trying to break it up into these little event-sized bits." See the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station Timeline Here

Listen

Transcript

English

NWJ: Hello and welcome to the Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast for Thursday, July 25th. My name is Nathaniel White-Joyal and today we are joined by Lucas Hixson and Fairewinds Chief Engineer, Arnie Gundersen. This is a podcast that can be enjoyed as an audio file, or if you want to follow along with our timeline and our spreadsheet, that’ll be possible, too, on our YouTube channel. We’re also going to have some really striking imagery of San Onofre. Good morning to both of you, and thanks for joining me.

AG: Hey, good morning, Nat. Good morning, Lucas.

LH: Good morning, Nat. Thanks for having me. Good morning, Arnie.

NWJ: This morning’s conversation is going to revolve around Southern California Edison’s power plant at San Onofre. We’re going to look at a timeline of events and we’re going to discuss the permanent closure of this plant earlier this year. So Arnie, would you like to get us started?

AG: The thing we’ve been talking about a lot lately is how a nuclear plant can have 40 great years and one really, really bad day. And it’s happened – obviously, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and three times at Fukushima. But we’ve developed a tool that I think is worth talking about to prevent that one bad day from happening in anybody’s back yard. And it’s a timeline that allows you to track what’s happening at your power plant in your back yard. What the tool does is it avoids nuclear speak, which of course the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the people that run these reactors loves to cloud things in technical words. But the second thing is the nuclear public relations people try to say well, the event today just happened and let’s just focus on the event today and we don’t have to worry about our history of problems at this site. Well, what this timeline does, and it’s designed to be used by anyone – what the timeline does is it allows people to track all the events that happened at their power plant. So therefore, when a public relations person says well, this is unique at this power plant, you can quickly go back and find out that it really isn’t unique. It’s an important tool. We used it to illustrate the problems at San Onofre. You know, San Onofre’s got 8 million people within 50 miles, so that’s a big back yard to have one bad day in. So San Onofre is the example we chose to use for this tool, but it could be used anywhere. I’m really pleased with the effort that Lucas has put in on this. This is another one of those cutting-edge tools that Fairewinds tries to provide the public. After Lucas is done describing this particular timeline, I’ll get back on and discuss how it has applications throughout the nuclear industry.

NWJ: Lucas, so take us through the timeline.

LH: First, Arnie, thank you for the kind words on the work. But really, when we were looking at the steam generator replacement project, we’re looking at a project that has extended almost a decade now. As Arnie said, when you’re looking at an event over time like this, often the data within that period gets jumbled up and remembering dates is very difficult. So there’s a few different ways that this information can be displayed to help make it more reader friendly. And that’s what we’ve tried to do here. And we have learned some things in the course of developing this project. We have really made an effort to go back and find the statements – the definitive statements that were being made by the licensee, by the regulators, by the manufacturer, to see the image that was proposed to the public, and then contrast that with the internal documented conversations that have come out since then to show the true nature of the story as it really happened. And what we have found is much different than you will read in most reports. It’s much more inclusive.

AG: You know, Lucas, I think it’s really interesting, because now of course the nuclear industry is blaming the NRC, different public relations people are saying well, the activists shut down San Onofre, and in fact, it was a super solid plant and deserves to run. But what your timeline shows is that the seeds for San Onofre’s failure didn’t happen when the tubes failed in 2012, but in fact, they happened in 2004. And it also shows that the root of the problem was decisions made by Edison and that Edison knew crystal clear that the steam generator wasn’t like for like. So I really like the timeline in that it focuses attention on the history – the historic decisions that were made that got us to where we are right now.

LH: This was not a certain project for Southern California Edison by any means. They had already had one reactor which had been decommissioned due to steam generator failures. And they were attempting to do everything they could to prevent that happening again – twice. Unfortunately, the best of their efforts were not good enough to help them succeed in that area. They ended up failing pretty catastrophically. But what you can begin to see is, starting in 2004, Southern California Edison manipulated the CPUC. They essentially hijacked the process and said if we don’t get the opportunity to charge and bill our customers for these steam generators, then we’re not going to be able to operate in a couple of years, and California is going to experience a power shortage like it’s never seen before. Now over the course of the last 18 months, we now know that California can not have San Onofre and the grid works just fine. In fact, the last major grid disturbance in California was due to the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant. The other thing that you see is that even internally, within the ownership of the nuclear power plant, there were questions and concerns about the process internally, within Southern California Edison. But also with other joint ownership – San Diego Gas & Electric – SDG&E. They had their concerns and opposed replacing the steam generators in 2005.

NWJ: So Lucas, would you do me a favor and just go back a little bit and explain to me what a CPUC is?

LH: Well, the CPUC is the California Public Utilities Commission. And it is supposed to be a ratepayer advocate. It is supposed to regulate the trade and sale of electricity to ensure that the cheapest and most available electricity makes its way out into the grid. Unfortunately, they are in many people’s opinions largely compromised due to the makeup of the Commission. The president is a former Southern California Edison executive. There are multiple utility executives on this commission. And it does seem to have this conflict of interest with the rules and the decisions that they’re making.

AG: So this tool we have here is – goes back to ’04 and up – essentially the last 10 years of data. There’s nothing stopping it from going back in time. But can you tell us how unique it is to San Onofre? Or is this a tool that can be used by other people to make out the nuke in their back yard?

LH: I think that this is an important tool for practically any nuclear installation. We have in the history created multiple timelines on the Fukushima disaster. I think that there are events that can be found and tracked at every nuclear power plant that go far beyond the imagination of the reader prior to seeing that timeline. I have yet to find a nuclear power plant where I have not been surprised, if not mildly alarmed at the track record that they show over time when you legitimately collect the data and analyze it on one plate instead of trying to break it up, as Arnie said, into these little event-sized bits. There’s two portions to the timeline: the front and the skin, that the reader looks at. And then the back end is actually little more than a spreadsheet. And it there in which you put in the data that allows us to present it in such a concise manner. But this is something that we’ll be sharing the format with with the reviewers and they can start assembling their own timelines. And we will work to expand our coverage with the use of timelines in the future.

AG: Now someone who’s interested in, let’s say, Davis Besse, can go back and get all the reports that they know of, and enter them into the timeline. And the timeline then – the spreadsheet – and the spreadsheet then puts things in order and flips them over into the timeline. So that’s a really handy feature and it doesn’t require a doctorate in nuclear physics.

LH: Correct. And that’s one of the things that we’ve really worked to do here is to create a tool that can be expanded in the future to cover more times, more events, more nuclear operating stations, and in a manner that people can assist us. Because this is nothing that we’re ever going to be able to do by ourselves. Fairewinds is not an island and was never intended to be. But what we work to do is provide the tools and information to the public. I think that’s an important part of the calculation here. The tools and the information. We want you to empower yourselves through your own knowledge and your own growth and development in your understanding of the industry.

AG: Moving forward, Fairewinds would love to work with local people to follow up on Davis Besse or Fort Calhoun or the Hanford site or the nuke in your backyard. So this tool would present a timeline for any one of those plants that we chose to get the data for.

LH: At this point, our limitations are not due to the lack of information. It is more constrained by our lack of manpower to be able to handle all of it. I see almost infinite expansion capabilities in the future.

AG: Different parties on the timeline are different colors, so you can track what Edison did, what the NRC did, etc.

LH: Yeah. One of the key important parts is not to have data get lost in the haystack. I mean we all know about the needle in the haystack. And that’s what happens with this industry where so much data is generated. So one of the things we’ve tried to do is try to make it easy for the reader to immediately understand the data as it’s set in front of them. And here’s some of the simple ways that we’ve done that. For example, different entities involved in this, whether it’s Southern California Edison, whether it’s Fairewinds Energy Education, the Friends of the Earth, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We have given them their own unique colors and also the icons for their corporate images to help the reader understand where the data is coming from and who is saying it. Because especially when you get as many data points as we have over a period of time, it kind of tends to blur together if you don’t have something that helps make different parts stand out to each other.

AG: And there’s no end to the timeline. If someone looks at the San Onofre timeline and says geez, I know something important, they can send it through as a comment at Fairewinds and just a matter of updating that spreadsheet and it pops up onto the timeline. So it’s designed to be user friendly and it’s designed to not stop at San Onofre, which I think is really exciting.

NWJ: With the ability to compile and organize this information, are we able to understand any deeper patterns from the creation of these timelines.

LH: That’s a very, very interesting question. Personally developing this timeline, I saw a few things. Number one was the repetitive marketing or forward-looking statements being provided by the utilities. And this is something I’ve harped on previously. But it’s almost comical if it wasn’t so alarming. Because what the public is hearing is not the actual fact of the matter. It is more or less the dressed-up frosted version which is meant to be glossed over, forgotten and allow the utility to continue to do what they want to do. Secondly, the other interesting trend that I noticed was the reactionary stance taken by the utility and the NRC throughout this incident. If you look at the timeline, it’s very interesting to note that often, the NRC did not issue a confirmatory letter or delayed a restart until after external analysis was provided. And there would be long gaps of information released by either the NRC or by Edison, unless someone else said something and they felt like they had to make their own stance on that or cover their tracks a little bit because the way it was being presented was not to their liking. And it was a very reactionary role as I saw it, instead of the proactive, protective role that we would like to see them take.

AG: I want to give a hat tip here to Shaun Burnie and Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth, because if you look at every time a Friends of the Earth/Fairewinds report came out, then the NRC or Edison would react. But were it not for Shaun and Kendra and Friends of the Earth pushing this process, in part by hiring Fairewinds, but also other experts and law firms, etc., this process would have been covered up by certainly Edison and likely the NRC as well.

NWJ: So Arnie, don’t you think we would have seen a catastrophic equipment failure if this behavior had been allowed to continue?

AG: Yeah, the experts that Friends of the Earth hired, including a guy named John Large, who’s a professional engineer in England, showed that if they started it up, the tubes were going to disintegrate in less than 11 months.

NWJ: This is outside of San Diego. How far outside?

AG: Too close. It’s within 50 miles of 8 million people. And the NRC and Edison wanted to start this reactor back up.

LH: I can say in good confidence that had the public not taken such a strong opposition to this in California, had independent analysts not been hired by organizations like Friends of the Earth, it is far more than likely that we would still see San Onofre operating at this day.

AG: Yeah, and of course, the analysis shows that within 11 months, it would have failed again. That’s analysis that the NRC knew and had in its possession. It’s very likely that they would have allowed the experiment to continue were it not for the fact that another party, Friends of the Earth, got involved.

LH: And this is not the end of this event. As we’ve talked about – and that’s one of the things we really wanted to tie into this timeline is that this is something that’s going to continue for decades into the future. And yes, we’re going to be updating the timeline with these new events. But we also want the readers to keep this in mind. Just because the choice has been made to decommission the nuclear power plant does not mean that it’s okay for complacency to creep back in now. There are still many, many serious challenges that the utility is going to have to face; many difficult decisions that they’re going to have to make. And if the public cannot reinforce that, if they cannot feel as if they can trust the utility in those endeavors, it’s not going to make life any easier in southern California. And so Arnie I think has done a great job of keeping people aware of the fact that they still need to be vigilant, they still need to be up to date and informed on these matters.

AG: You know, there’s still going to be hot radioactive fuel in the fuel pool at San Onofre for five years. There’s still going to be 30-plus years of nuclear waste at San Onofre likely for 20 or 30 or 40 years. Vigilance doesn’t end when the reactor shuts down. I’d like to thank you, Lucas, for developing this tool and remind everybody that it’s not just for San Onofre. We can do it again on the power plant that’s in your back yard. And I’d like to also note that this is our fund raising month and this is the type of material Fairewinds turns out for citizens so we can become better citizen scientists. We hope that you can donate to allow us to continue to do this kind of cutting-edge research.

NWJ: Guys, thanks for joining me today. It’s been incredibly informative and we’ve all gotten a chance to really understand what’s happening at San Onofre. Hopefully, we’ll see more of these timelines so we can better understand what’s going on at power plants around the world.

AG: Thanks, Nat.

LH: Thanks, Nat.

NWJ: This podcast has been a production of Fairewinds Energy Education.